


Interstice

by NightsMistress



Category: Memory's Dogma (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Blood Loss, Canon-Typical Violence, Exhaustion, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Past Attempted Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:41:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23936251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: After the main events of the game, Hiroki and Reina hide out in a love hotel to give Hiroki time to clean up and take stock of everything that had happened in the last 48 hours. Part of that involves dealing with his complicated relationship with memory, grief, and loss.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4
Collections: Be The First! 2020





	Interstice

The love hotel room was exactly what Hiroki had expected: a long, windowless room dominated by a large bed on the far wall, with a sofa and coffee table in the middle and a bathroom to his left as he stood just inside the closed door. The room was only fractionally smaller than his entire apartment, and was dominated by large furniture in shades of white, cream and neutral. If it weren’t for the discreet box of condoms on the corner of the coffee table, he could imagine that he was visiting some wealthy Westerner’s house overseas. The contrast between its soft opulence and the sleek, hard surfaces of the Tokyo Connect Centre made him dizzy. 

Then again, pretty much everything made him dizzy at the moment. The adrenaline that had kept him moving was fading, leaving in its wake the dull and distant ache of healing injuries. He knew everything should hurt, and it did not. Instead, he felt slow and absent, a passenger in his own body, watching the world as if it were a movie and about as real.

“It really is private,” Reina commented. Her smile was fleeting, sublimated into an exhausted frown, but was the most life that Hiroki had seen from her in the last day or so. Idly, he wondered how long they’d been underground, looked at a clock, and then looked away. It was only mid-morning, suggesting that they had either only been in the Connect Centre a few hours, or over a day, and he wasn’t sure which option was worse. 

“Yeah,” Hiroki replied when the pressure of the silence became too much to bear. “Kakeru and I did our research.”

He forced himself to breathe around the pain of recollection. At the time, Kakeru’s enthusiasm about various love hotels had been mortifying, and Hiroki had only promised to go one day just to stop Kakeru from pressing the issue. Kakeru had been confident that Sorano would have said yes without reservation, Hiroki less so. Sorano was incandescent and brilliant, the sun around which Hiroki revolved, and he’d spent too much time fretting that he wasn’t enough for her. He should have listened to Kakeru. He should have spoken to Sorano. He should have taken the opportunities that he had rejected, because now he knew exactly how she had felt about him and it was all too late.

He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. The pain from the bruises on his shoulder blades as he pressed them against the wall was something real and tangible, and he sighed as the wall took his weight. He took a moment to breathe, in and out, as steadily as he could, against the pallid weakness that threatened to topple him. 

“Are you awake?” Reina asked tentatively.

“Yeah,” Hiroki said on a sigh, opening his eyes. She was hovering just outside an arm’s length from him, and he felt exhausted just looking at her. “Just tired. I don’t know why.”

Reina looked at him for a moment longer, searching for something in his face, before moving further into their rented room and slipping off her shoes. Her back was as caked with blood and dirt as her front. There was a lot of it on her, and him as well, and he supposed he should be more worried about what that meant for him in terms of blood loss. Instead, all he could manage was a vague unhappiness about it all, ephemeral and easily crushed under the weight of everything bearing down on him now that he had stopped moving.

“You should shower and get some rest,” Reina suggested, thumbing her MRD and bringing up a display. Even now, as tired as she was, she manipulated the various menus with astonishing proficiency. Hiroki found himself mesmerized by the interplay of her fingers against the hard light display of her MRD. “We’ve got the room for twelve hours.”

“You should use the shower first,” Hiroki said. It was too hard to look at her properly, and all he could muster was to angle his head where it rested against the wall.

Reina scoffed. “You need it more.”

“Yeah, I know,” Hiroki replied, eyes closing once more. “But I need to charge my MRD.”

“All right,” Reina said. “There should be orange juice in the bar fridge. You should eat something too before you faint.”

The idea of eating anything made Hiroki’s stomach spasm queasily, and he swallowed against nausea. Still, Reina was right. Neither of them had eaten anything substantial since their brief stay at Sorano and Aoi-san’s house, and a lot had happened since then.

“Do you want anything?” His voice was still hoarse, he noted absently. He’d screamed a lot as Kuroda had drilled into his skull, until his screams were the only thing that made sense in the world. Maybe he should be more disturbed about that.

“I don’t care.” Reina’s voice was flat and expressionless. He could hear the sliding of a door on rollers, the scrape of metal against metal, and he opened his eyes to see Reina pull two white fluffy dressing gowns from the wardrobe. “Just pick something you want.”

Hiroki didn’t want anything, but saying that seemed too hard. He nodded instead, pushing away from the wall and staggering towards the nearest MRD powering station. He shoved his MRD onto it, and stood there, leaning against the nearby wall for balance as the sound of the shower echoed throughout the silent room. Time must have passed, but it was only when his MRD beeped to indicate that it had charged enough that he registered its passage. He hadn’t quite fallen asleep, but it was a very close thing.

Swallowing was hard; his mouth was dry and his tongue thick, and he knew why. He’d bled out enough times since Sorano died to know why he was thirsty and slow. If he had been admitted to hospital again they would have forced fluids into him. He hadn’t wanted the fluids then, and he didn’t want them now, but he also didn’t want to inconvenience Reina with his death. He managed a faint smile at the thought; if only Kakeru were here to see the shift in his mentality. 

His new outlook on not dying didn’t mean that he enjoyed drinking the orange juice he had found in the bar fridge. He drank it anyway, forcing himself to continue as his throat protested against the pulp suspended in the juice. He breathed in and out until he felt steady enough to bring up the display on his MRD, and read through the hotel’s room service menu. None of the food options looked appealing, so he chose several at random. He then slid down the wall to the floor, head leaning back against the cool plaster, and let himself drift.

“Hiroki?”

Hiroki blinked his gaze back into focus, looking up at Reina. The terry toweling dressing gown swamped her, and she looked dull and tired. He looked away from her red eyes and puffy face, uncertain what he should say in response to it.

“Room service’s ordered,” he mumbled, looking at an abstract print on the wall, all colors twining around one another to create a spiraling ribbon. 

“Thank you,” Reina said, settling onto the sofa with a long, weary sigh. “The shower’s yours.”

“Yeah,” Hiroki said. “Thanks.”

The bathroom was humid and the mirror glass still half-fogged despite the running dehumidifier. Hiroki’s mind went blank after he closed the door, and he forgot what he was doing and where he was. Then he blinked, shuddered as he remembered a little of what had brought him here, and turned the shower on. The water was hot and plentiful, and for a moment Hiroki just stood under it and let it fall on him. The water at his feet was muddy with loose dirt pounded away by the water, and the force of the water loosened tight and strained muscles. He always felt stiff after using his powers, despite the fact that he healed them rapidly. The pain lingered, but there were no marks or scars, and as the blood washed off all that was exposed was unblemished skin. There were no marks of all of his efforts to join Sorano, or to save her.

He missed his scars. Without them, how could he rely on something as ephemeral as memory?

He used the small bar of hotel soap to scrub at the blood ingrained in the skin of his left hand. He was surprised, yet again, by the sight of his foreshortened finger. It was strange that he kept forgetting that it had happened, especially as the more he looked at it the more he remembered. He swallowed against the memory of Aoi-san’s cool fingers holding his hand in place. Her hand trembled when he begged her to stop, the sharp threat of the blade scraping against his skin as she shook, but she hadn’t stopped. Nothing he did at the time had stopped her. He let his hand drop, and closed his eyes to concentrate on the water falling on him. Once his breathing settled to a weary sigh once more, he resumed cleaning his hand. 

That done, he started to wash his hair. He’d delayed it for as long as possible, wanting to steel himself, but he thought that he was ready now. Most of the blood had been loosened by the hot water, leaving only the most stubborn patches close to his scalp. He supposed that it made sense that the blood had pooled at the back, given how he had been strapped in place. The sensation of loosened blood clots slipping across his fingertips was horrible, but tolerable, even if the blood felt grittier than usual. On the second rinse, he found something solid inside a clump of hair close to the base of his skull. It felt long and slender to his grasping fingers, thin and surprisingly strong, and a flicker of morbid curiosity drove him to pull it out to take a closer look at it.

Nestled on his palm was a shard of bone, as long as his first finger joint and tapered to a point. There was still dried blood in a shallow groove on the bone, the groove itself long and sharp-edged, as if created by a glancing blow that had skidded across the top. Hiroki looked down at his feet, and saw several smaller pieces of bone on the tiles, smaller and more fragmented than the one he held in his hand. He had been pulling small fragments of bone out from where they had been glued to his hair by blood and brain matter and not even noticed. What else had he not noticed? His vision tunneled until all he could focus on was the bone shard in his hand, and he felt his knees buckle.

When he could see again, he was sitting on the floor of the shower, back against the tiles, as water fell on him. He couldn’t catch his breath, and it felt like every time he tried to breathe he was only making the suffocation worse. He forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply, counting to five on each breath, until it felt like he could get air back into his lungs once more. He drew his legs up to his chest and buried his face in his knees.

The thought of finding more bone shards was sickening. The thought of the shards remaining in his hair was worse, and he forced himself to reach up and finish scrubbing his scalp. This time around, all his fingers found was hair. He remained on the floor and let the water rinse away some of what had happened to him, only turning it off when the water started to run cold. Before he stood, he forced himself to scoop up the bone pieces, swallowing against nausea. After all of this, he couldn’t bear throwing up the orange juice from earlier. 

Hiroki dumped the bone shards into the garbage bin under the vanity, before putting on his own bathrobe. The weight of the fabric was comforting, and he felt less shaky. His hand trembled as he used his palm to swipe at the glass of the fogged up mirror. His reflection looked exhausted, with dark rings under his eyes, but there was no sign of his earlier panic attack. Maybe he could pass off the residual shivering as fatigue. He took a moment to compose himself before leaving the bathroom.

He froze when he saw that at some point room service had delivered their food. He wasn’t sure that he liked that he hadn’t heard the delivery, given that they were fugitives. It didn’t bode well for his long-term survival. Then again, considering his food choices were three variations of dumplings, each laid out neatly on serving plates, that didn’t bode well either.

“You like dumplings?” Reina asked with an ironic smile. She held her chopsticks between her fingers, but her plate was empty. He could sympathize.

“No,” Hiroki said, sitting next to her on the sofa. This close to Reina, he could tell that she smelled like the clove and lime soap from the shower, and he supposed he did too. The scent was peculiarly reassuring, because it didn’t smell like antiseptic, and he slumped back into the soft cushions, looking up at the ceiling. “I wasn’t really looking.” 

“You should eat something,” Reina urged, putting something on his leg. When he looked down he saw that the something was a small plate and chopsticks. Six dumplings rested on the plate. Closer proximity did not make the prospect of eating food more appealing, but he ate a dumping anyway under Reina’s pleading gaze. It tasted like sand and stuck in his throat, even as he ate it in small, careful bites. The second was easier, because he was able to recognize the nausea for hunger.

“So should you,” he said, after eating a third dumpling. “It’s easier once you start.”

Reina looked up from her wan contemplation of the food. “Yeah, I know.”

Reina had been flat and withdrawn since the morning. Maybe even longer. There were gaps in his memory that should frighten him. He asked, “Did anything happen to you while I was out?”

Reina looked at him, startled, and then started to laugh, helpless and brittle and nearly hysterical. Hiroki looked at her in consternation, uncertain what he should do to fix this. 

“How can you say that?” she asked once she stopped laughing. She hiccupped but didn’t start again. “No, nothing happened to me. It all happened to you. They were testing the chip, there’d be no point in hurting me.”

“Sorry,” Hiroki said, and was not sure why he was apologizing. _Sorry I left you alone,_ perhaps, or _Sorry that I need you here, but I’m afraid of what I’ll do if I’m left on my own._ It probably was _I don’t know why I’m apologizing, but I am._

Reina choked. “I don’t even know why you’re apologizing.”

“Me neither,” Hiroki confessed. “But I’m glad we didn’t split up.”

Reina smiled at that, small and fragile, and took his left hand in hers. She brushed the tip of his ring finger with the pad of her index finger. Hiroki shivered, because her touch didn’t hurt at all.

“Did that hurt?” Reina asked, stricken, her grip going lax around his hand. 

“No, it didn’t,” Hiroki said, tightening his grip on her hand. The sensation of skin against skin was grounding, reminding him that he existed in this space and time, and that he was not dreaming. He had survived everything, and while he was on the run he wasn’t alone. “Your chip worked as it should. It just didn’t heal all the way. I guess I wanted some mark of everything that happened.”

“I’m sorry for dragging you into this,” Reina said. “This is all my fault.”

“I was always going to get involved in this,” Hiroki said. “This way I got answers. I finally know what happened to Sorano. That was worth everything.”

“If you say so,” Reina replied. “Now eat your food. You look awful.”

“You should as well,” Hiroki said, slanting a look across at Reina. “You don’t look much better.”

“That’s not a kind thing to say to a girl,” Reina said, but sulkily ate a dumpling anyway.

With each bite, the tension that had kept Hiroki upright drained from him, until he ate the last one and didn’t think he could move at all. The world felt hazy and indistinct but in a soft and comforting way, not like the unreal sensation of earlier. It wasn’t until Reina shook his shoulder that he realised he was leaning on her.

“Was I falling asleep?” he asked muzzily. He rubbed at his face to try and wake up. It didn’t work.

“You were,” Reina agreed. “Now, get on the bed. It might be the last one we have for a while.”

He did as he was told, rising to his feet as Reina pulled on his arm, and staggering to the bed. He fell, and the blankets were as soft as they looked, absorbing the impact. It wasn’t until Reina took his hand in his that he realized that she was on the bed as well.

“Sorry, I just —” she said, and then cut herself off.

“I don’t want to be alone either,” Hiroki said, and thumbed the lights off with his MRD.


End file.
